Becoming an expert. IPCCs and IPBESs socialization of young scholars as experts.

Expert organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES), have become increasingly important in the efforts to manage current environmental challenges. By gathering, assessing, and communicating policy-relevant knowledge, the IPCC and IPBES, as well as their experts, have gained great power as centers of knowledge practices.

This project explores the production of expertise in expert organizations by focusing on the roles of young scholars in IPCC and IPBES. Being socialized as experts, young scholars have unique insight into what it means to be an expert in expert organizations. The project is guided by four questions: (i) how expertise is defined and epistemic-authority-created, (ii) how young scholars are socialized into experts, (iii) how experts gather, assess, and communicate policy-relevant knowledge, and (iv) how institutional opportunities and obstacles in the socialization process should be understood, managed, and used.

This project consists of comparative document and interview studies of the socialization of young scholars within the IPCC and IPBES. The project?s knowledge outcome is of relevance to maintaining and developing expert organizations to coordinate expertise to produce policy-relevant knowledge in support of sustainable management of society and the environment.

Parts of the project will be conducted at Wageningen University and Research center, the Netherlands.